There are lots of good tricks out there. The general method I use is to find likely sources of detailed information and then read. A lot. The gems are hidden in plain sight. You just have to dig through a lot of dirt.
One source of information that I think is good is /r/churning. I've been churning for over 12 years so I haven't read much there, but I've heard it referenced several times and have glanced over it and think it probably is a good place to read up on it.
My guess is that you're going at it too hard and too fast. If you want to churn for a long period of time, you need to treat it like a marathon and not a sprint. Personally, I sit down about once a year, collect all of the good offers available then, and apply for them all at once. I then use the next several months to do the spending and collect the bonuses. I then put it away for nine months or so and do it all over again.
This year, I was approved for ten new credit cards and am mostly done collecting bonuses and rewards worth $8,165 to me. Last year I was approved for eight new credit cards and collected bonuses and rewards worth $5,530 to me.
Someone else randomly bumped this thread, but have you been able to duplicate the 8-10 cards pear year in the subsequent years since then?
Nope. Several reasons:
1. Lack of motivation due to lack of need. I had only been retired about three years when I wrote that, and even though I was probably somewhere around a 2% net WR, I was still avidly working on my finances. Maybe I was competitive with myself, maybe I enjoyed it, maybe my inner bag person was still active. Nowadays, I've been retired over eight years, have a sub-0.50% net WR, and my net worth is up 61% since 2019. I still can do this sort of stuff if I want to, but I have also given myself permission to not do it if it isn't fun. Mostly it isn't fun any more.
2. Piggybacking. For me, piggybacking is better than credit card churning on the three dimensional scale of fun, income, and hassle factor. For someone like me with a long credit history, a lot of cards, and a large amount of aggregate credit, churning and piggybacking are inherently somewhat incompatible - you get paid more in piggybacking if you have cards with longer history and higher limits; with churning you don't care as much about keeping cards a long time and limits don't matter as much.
3. My history makes it difficult. I've done a lot of credit games over the past twenty-five (!) years or so. My credit report shows a lot of open cards, a lot of closed cards, a large amount of credit extended. Many of the good cards are ones I've already gotten and used for the SUB or whatever and so I'm limited by the offer terms. Or I'm limited because I already have a lot of credit with the major players and I'd rather allocate that credit to my piggybacking cards. Yes, I could make more effort to sort through the offers and work around these things, but then items (1) and (2) above come into play - too much hassle that I don't need.
4. Without going into too much detail because it's their financial lives and not mine, I help my Dad, my three kids, and occasionally my sisters and their families with financial items. These items are more significant and more interesting than churning.
I do still somewhat keep track and will apply for juicy and simple card offers, especially if I can simultaneously start the clock on a card for piggybacking purposes later. But the rate at which I do this is no longer 8-10 cards per year. My last card I opened was a Barclays AARP card about a year ago for a $100 SUB / $500 / 90 days offer, and that card is now aging for piggybacking because my previous Barclays card had hit the piggybacking limit. Before that, I got approved for two out of three cards and two out of six CLI requests about two years ago. I just had five hard inquiries fall off about a month ago so I may look again when I feel like it.
